Taking Action: Teaching Participatory Community-based Theater – Leslie Delmenico

Leslie Delmenico

Leslie Delmenico is an actor who teaches a senior seminar in community-based theater at Grinnell College in Iowa.

Leslie Delmenico: The class consisted of three parts and was distinguished by a central mini-course in community-based playwriting, led by veteran Australian community performance writer Graham Pitts, who was in residence at Grinnell for two weeks. The first weeks of the course had a triple focus: researching local (town and/or campus) issues, studying the theory and practice of alternative/community-based theater and performance ethnography and interviewing local people.

The central part of the class was a week-long writing intensive in which the class worked full-time on collaborative script creation.

The final, rehearsal period also involved organizing the performance spaces and refreshments and advertising, in part by delivering fliers to every household in town. There were four performances of The Meeting in various venues, with coffee-and-dessert talk-backs. There was also a later opportunity for student debriefing, which included the college community-relations officer.

Q: How does one get a community-based theater course included in the curriculum?

Delmenico: With luck, I think: being a new faculty member of a college in which social activism is a value, having a supportive chair (who also heads the local community theater), and having a new International Visiting Scholar program that supports something as grounded in practicality as community-based performance. I am also lucky to have strong interdisciplinary support from the Prairie Studies, Sociology and Anthropology departments at Grinnell.

This course will not be in the curriculum consistently, but I will try to gear Senior Seminar towards this kind of work the next time I teach it, and intend to use the principles of ethnographic work in other Performance Studies courses I teach. I think it is extremely important for students to become sensitive to the environment in which they live for a formative four years.

Q: How does one structure a community-based theater class?

Delmenico: This class was structured with the playwriting process as a central point, but the theory/plays, ethnographic work/individual structuring of interviews, although packed into the first part of the semester, were certainly as important pedagogically. Bringing the work to performance, and having the experience of interviewing, writing and performing the words of their interviewees was a moving process for the students, as was having their words enacted for the people who were interviewed.

Q: What are the goals of such a class?

Delmenico: The goal of this class was three-directional: towards the participating students, the campus and the larger community. For the students, the goals (to use Dwight Conquergood's three A's of performance ethnography) were academic (to learn about this under-represented form of theater), artistic (to learn how to create a form of community-based theater) and activist (to foster listening across divides and to give public voice to topics and viewpoints not generally addressed openly in a small town). For the college and larger community, the goal was, as playwright Graham Pitts observed, the creation of a "talking tree," that permanent geographical or ephemeral metaphorical gathering point at which diverse views are expressed and respectfully heard.

Q: What materials and activities are appropriate for inclusion?

See syllabus and assignments.

Q: What concerns do you have about the above or anything else related to the topic?

Delmenico: My concern is less about the project itself than about its after-effects. Grinnell students study the town quite a bit, and there are a number of reports "gathering dust" (as I've been told) in various college archives. This performance was effective (in that it was well-attended and well-received by townsfolk as well as college folk), and the participating students were told that The Meeting was very meaningful to people in the community. My uncertainty is about what comes of the project, about the college's responsibility, about how the "talking tree" continues to grow.

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Original CAN/API publication: September 2001